The Nixon-era White House was notoriously riddled with intrigue, behind-the-scenes machinations, and paranoia. This combination would ultimately lead to the Watergate scandals, which brought down many in the Administration, including Nixon himself. But others—including some who were avid participants in the White House's culture of rampant wiretaps, leaks, and double dealing—escaped unscathed. One such man was Henry Kissinger, Nixon's brilliant but complicated and famously self-serving national security adviser and secretary of state.

To this day, Kissinger's legacy remains a matter of controversy. Some see him as an unscrupulous operator who would stop at nothing to amass and retain power. Others hail him as a foreign-policy genius whose diplomatic triumphs include softening U.S.-Soviet relations, masterminding the U.S. disengagement from Vietnam, facilitating an Arab-Israeli truce, and initiating talks with China. Over the years, a number of Atlantic writers have contributed to the discourse on Kissinger and his legacy.

In the June 2005 Atlantic, Chicago Tribune editor James Warren presents a selection of transcripts from Kissinger's telephone conversations. As it turns out, Kissinger made a point of having his secretaries eavesdrop on his official telephone calls and transcribe them for posterity. In 1977 he donated them to the National Archives and Records Administration on the condition that the records remain sealed until after his death. But last year, under pressure from researchers, the government reversed itself and released all 20,000 pages. In "The Kissinger Transcripts," Warren offers an array of less-than-flattering excerpts. We see Kissinger, among other things, castigating a Women's Wear Daily columnist for making unsubstantiated innuendos, promising not to reveal polling data which he then immediately discloses to someone else, and instructing the head of the joint chiefs of staff to "just fire somebody" over a Pentagon leak.

More than two decades ago, just a few years after Kissinger left the White House, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour M. Hersh commented in-depth on what he perceived as Kissinger's unsavory approach to carrying out his job. Maintaining his own authority within the White House, Hersh explained in "Kissinger and Nixon in the White House," was of paramount importance to Kissinger, and achieving this primarily translated into "keeping his sole client—Richard Nixon—pleased."

One problem, however, was that when Kissinger first came on board, he brought several colleagues from his academic life with him. As tensions over Vietnam escalated, the loyalty of these men—some of whom were liberal—began to come into question. And when concerns arose that certain people within the Administration may have been leaking classified information, Kissinger authorized FBI investigations and wiretaps against members of his staff. His motives in this, Hersh speculated, probably had less to do with a desire to plug leaks than with his own desperation to prove his loyalty:

Four of those tapped ... were Jewish; tapping them not only played into the anti-Semitism in the Oval Office but also demonstrated that Kissinger [who was himself Jewish] was able to rise above his religious background... If his staff was too Jewish and too liberal for Nixon and his chief aides, Kissinger made the necessary adjustments.

Hersh also made note of a distasteful tendency on Kissinger's part to employ vicious rumor to discredit those around him.

The backbiting grew intense by the end of [1969]. Secretary of State Rogers was a "fag" who had some strange hold over the President; Mel Laird was a megalomaniac who constantly leaked anti-Kissinger stories to the press; and Richard Nixon was a secret drunk of dubious intelligence.

In his desire to retain as much control within the White House as possible, Kissinger also made a point of excluding others from the flow of information. This meant hoarding large amounts of data within his own office and—with ever-increasing paranoia—fending off efforts by others to access it. Given that he had ordered the wiretapping of so many people himself, it should not be surprising that Kissinger was worried that someone might be doing the same thing to him. He routinely had his office phones checked for taps, and made sure that the inspection was carried out by a different agency each time, lest one of those agencies plant a wiretap itself.

Special teams from the Secret Service, CIA, FBI, or National Security Agency would be summoned to his office at random and on short notice to inspect... One aide, asked why Kissinger did not simply permanently assign the FBI to monitor his phones, responded: "Who trusted Hoover?"

As for the Watergate scandal, Hersh suggests that Kissinger was as deeply implicated as those who ended up taking the blame.

Kissinger escaped any serious investigation during Watergate, as those attorneys who had some doubts soon found themselves immersed in various other matters. One prosecution official, discussing that White House tape recording years later, recalled a quality of Kissinger's conduct in front of Nixon, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman that made him wish he could have listened to more of Kissinger's Oval Office meetings. "He was like one of the boys, talking tough. One says, 'Let's bring knives.' Another says, 'Let's bring bats.' And Henry pipes up, 'Let's bring zip-guns.'" The prosecutor recalled his surprise at hearing Kissinger: "I thought he might have been classier."

That Kissinger had lied about his role ... was widely assumed in the Washington press corps, and even inside the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, but Kissinger was permitted to slide by with his half-truths and misstatements. Only Richard Nixon, Alexander Haig, some of the men around them, and a few Watergate prosecutors fortunate enough to have learned what was on the White House tapes understood the truth: Kissinger was involved.

Two years earlier, in "The Craft and Craftiness of Henry Kissinger,"Washington Post editor Philip Geyelin had likewise criticized Kissinger's operating style. Geyelin noted that Kissinger deserved credit for his foreign-policy successes. But, in his view, both Kissinger and Nixon had displayed a dismaying disregard for proper governing procedures and for the will of the American people. Their approach was simply to do as they saw fit, withholding crucial information from others and circumventing protocol that might have kept them in check. Indeed, "the Nixon-Kissinger strategy," Geyelin wrote, "was not designed for an open society."

While Kissinger was perhaps a little less outraged or driven to less frenzy than Nixon by the exercise of the right to free speech by American citizens who did not agree with one or another policy, he ... had a hand in inciting—and in executing—at least some of the President's more draconian efforts to suppress dissenting voices, close down government leaks, and crush the protest movement.

Ultimately, Geyelin suggested, the seeds of the Nixon Administration's demise may have lain within Nixon's and Kissinger's anti-democratic attitude. "So repressive of dissent" was their approach, he wrote, "that it strained the American system of government beyond tolerable limits."

More recently, in "Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism" (June 1999), Atlantic correspondent Robert D. Kaplan defended Kissinger. In some contexts, he suggested, imperviousness to public pressures can be seen as commendable.

Isn't what angers so many people about President Bill Clinton and other current politicians the fact that they make policy according to the results of public-opinion polls rather than to their own conviction? ... It is likely that in prolonging the [Vietnam] war [over the objections of protestors], Kissinger and Nixon demonstrated more real character than do many of our present leaders.

Kaplan also sought to explain two of Kissinger's more reviled foreign-policy moves—his decision (after having opted not to end the Vietnam War when he had the opportunity in 1969) to heavily bomb North Vietnam in 1972 and Cambodia in 1973. Many observers have construed those bombings as gratuitously brutal and unnecessary. But Kaplan suggested that they represented a strategic move; it was too late to save face in Vietnam, but such a display of "cold-bloodedness," by demonstrating that the Nixon White House was not to be trifled with, "actually improved America's geopolitical position vis-à-vis China, the Soviet Union and the Arab world."

The suggestion that leaders in China, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere would respond to Kissinger and Nixon based on their recent behavior in Vietnam is eminently reasonable. What strains credulity is the idea that our Cold War adversaries would not take into consideration Kissinger's and Nixon's bloodthirstiness in Indochina in the face of fierce criticism from the American public.

Given Kissinger's unpopularity in many circles, Kaplan's decision to defend him in the pages of The Atlantic required a certain degree of fortitude. "It is not easy for me to put forward this argument," he wrote. "Many people I know professionally in the journalistic and policy communities, and whom I respect, despise Kissinger." But Kaplan also argued that, popular or not, Kissinger has done more to shape the debate in this country than any who have succeeded him in the State Department.

Though he has been gone from office for more than two decades, Kissinger hovers over many foreign-policy discussions to a degree that more likable and recent Secretaries of State, such as Shultz and Cyrus Vance, do not.

Perhaps, then, loath as we may be to admit it, Kissinger's legacy is one that we would be wise to continue to engage with and learn from as we chart a course forward in uncertain times.

Despite his grave German accent, his dire view of humanity, and his preoccupation with European history, Kissinger—who negotiated with rather than confronted the Soviet Union, who helped Nixon to withdraw from Vietnam 550,000 soldiers in three years under combat conditions, and who generally supported interventions that were popular while expressing skepticism about those that weren't—may have understood his adopted nation better than most people think he did.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.